2-13: The Last Western Tournament of 2025

Hello and welcome back to the Battle Frontier podcast, where we aim to help you level up in your journey as a competitive Pokemon TCG player. I'm Aaron Curry, here with me as always is my co-host Jon Orgel, and since we missed last week due to Thanksgiving and just having busy schedules during the week, we're going to touch on LAIC, including some of the, I guess, extracurricular outcomes as a result of some things that happened during that event. Before we get into the Stukart results this week, and some of the new things that have come in with our Phantasmal Flames format. But before we get into that, I've got two weeks of catching up with what Jon has been doing in Pokemon, since he did not go to either of those events. So why don't you hit me with it Jon, what have you been up to? Yeah, I've been doing a little bit of local tournaments the last couple weeks. Not last weekend, but the weekend before LAIC weekend, I played in a League Cup. I know it was the week before LAIC, because it was like the old format. I played in the League Cup, and it was a, I don't know, I've played in a couple of Mickey Mouse, like we had seven, we had I think for the League Cup, we had seven Masters. And so we ended up not having a top cut. And thankfully, the organizer switched it to best two out of three, instead of a best like 30 minute single game Swiss. So best two out of three, 50 minutes in Swiss. And I won that cup going 2-0-1. I had one really tough match against the Charizard. And it was like, we ended up going to time. And I don't really know how it would have finished. I think we had just started game three. So there really wasn't any like determinate winner. That was like round two. So that was a good set. And yeah, it was, it was a good matchup. Like, and then the other two matches I played were against the Mega Absol, Mega Kangaskhan deck. I ranked Goldengo, which I got really tired of playing Dragapult. I know it's a strong deck, but it just feels really weak right now. It feels like maybe I'm just not up to snuff with my sequencing or something like that. And it's just a demoralizing deck. I don't know. Maybe it's just me. But it feels like even the games I win, I'm just losing and losing and losing and losing. And then the last, there's two turns and it's over. And I've come back from four prizes down to go, okay, Iona to two, or Dusknoir Iona to one. And then set up a bunch of stuff. And if you don't have an answer for it the next turn, I win the game. I mean, that's a deck. That's viable. But I like playing Goldengo because you play from ahead. It's easier to sequence and just play correctly and win more games that way instead of sweating it out. And Iona-ing your opponent late to one card and praying they don't get it. And now I'm the deck that gets Iona-ed to one late and my opponent is praying I don't get it. But with Goldengo, if you've thinned your deck out appropriately and have gathered your resources and maintained what you have left in deck and tried to make a board state that can draw a bunch of cards if it does get Iona-ed down to one, it's pretty hard to lose. At least in my experience. And I've ran Megamaw a while for the Cornerstone, so that felt nice against those Mega Absol decks. It does just enough. It's not like a great card, but it does enough to counter that. And I'm interested to try out some of the new stuff we saw in Stuttgart. And we'll get into that in just a minute. I also played in a League Challenge today before we recorded, recording on Wednesday. We're doing a little later than we normally do. And I got first in that and I beat... What did I beat? I think two Dragapult decks. And then the first round was somebody just made a fun deck. So it was like an Aegislash, Tinkerton... Yeah, that kind of deck. So I don't know. Yeah, it was fine. It was good. So yeah, a little bit of Pokemon. I watched some of the streams the last couple weeks. Lots of action going on. And then personal life. Thanksgiving was good. We had my in-laws in town and we had a nice, just kind of chill Thanksgiving with them. And then our friends came from... They were out west in the Appalachian Mountains and then drove through on their way back home to Virginia Beach. So we spent all Saturday with them and a little bit of Sunday. And that was nice. Hanging out with them and going to breweries and going to record stores and stuff like that. So it was a good little relaxing Thanksgiving break for me. But yeah, that's enough of me. How about you, Ben? I haven't talked with you in a minute. Yeah, well, for anybody watching the video, I'm sure that you noticed as soon as I put on the episode. My son and I were doing some stuff in the backyard. Baseball, of course, because that's kind of his whole world right now. And I just managed to take a ball to the face at some point. So my eye is looking significantly better than it was, but still not fully healed. But that was Wednesday last week. No, I'm trying to think. I already talked about the last challenge that I played. And I haven't really been doing a ton of in-person Pokemon. I've been playing a good amount of ladder because I have a new favorite deck in the game. And I think everybody's playing it wrong. But we can get to that when we talk about Stewkart. Other than that, Thanksgiving was good. Just more baseball. We've got a semi-local holiday tournament that involves pool play games, both last night and that one really late, which is why we're recording a day late. But then we had another game today, and then we've got another game tomorrow. And then we've got a whole bracket this coming weekend. So just exciting stuff, a lot of fun, but very time-consuming. So it makes it very difficult to do other things. I know my wife went with her sister. They actually left basically as soon as we were done eating on Thanksgiving. And they went and stayed over in Orlando to do a bunch of Black Friday shopping over the weekend. And so I was just getting some stuff done at home while they were out, having a good time. Nothing else really. Nothing crazy. Just life, hanging out, adulting. Not a ton of Pokemon. Did you make any Black Friday purchases? Anything like that? Nothing that I want to announce for the— All the viewers. Well, not for the viewers. I'm not worried about them. I'm worried about any particular viewers who might be listening that may or may not be related to me that would be receiving any of these items. And I just don't want them to know what they are. So too bad. Too bad. I'm going to maintain that anonymity. But I think that that is enough of my—I don't know. It feels like I'm in a spot right now where I just haven't really been doing as much Pokemon, especially compared to last year. And that's for good reason. So I guess I can publicly unveil, since even though people who are close to us have known this for a while. My wife is currently pregnant and is coming up on her third trimester now. So that's one of the main reasons that I took a big step back this season and am not trying to play nearly as much and just trying to get the house ready. That's kind of one of the things I was doing last week. We moved our son from one room in the house into a slightly bigger room so we could set things up for the baby. And I've started painting and whatnot in the room and assembling furniture and just trying to get everything set up as good to go as possible to try to be as prepared as possible. But for anybody who does have kids, you would know you can never be prepared enough. It is not possible. You just do your best and you hang on and hope that it works out. And I think that that's pretty true for a lot of things in life. And, you know, especially when you go to these very large Pokemon tournaments where you are at the mercy of Tom and your top decks. And you never know what your opponent is playing until they flip over their active Pokemon, especially in the early rounds. And that was definitely the case for a lot of people as they went down to L.A. I see two weeks ago. We're not going to spend a ton of time on this event. There are two pretty big things that we need to talk about, obviously. But because we've moved on from the format, we're not going to do a huge, huge, huge deep dive on any of these particular decks. With the exception of one, because I just wanted to toot my own horn from our predictions that we had made in Vegas a couple of weeks ago where I had tried to call out that. I thought that a hybrid variant of Gardevoir was particularly well positioned in the Mega Evolution format. And lo and behold, we had Pager Pertusi showing up at L.A. I see and taking the entire event down with such a build. And so kind of just the highlights here are a Jellicent line, but still managing to play all of your big basic one hit KO options like Drifloon. And then obviously, of course, you're still going to have Screamtail. But maintaining the Drifloon in conjunction with the Jelly Package is what I had initially envisioned there. And Pager pulling through for me in the clutch was not my pick in my overall prediction for the event. I think I talked about William Azevedo, if I remember correctly. I'm sure you have written down. Yeah, you have William picked. And I'm not. I think he finished in top 32. If I remember correctly. Okay. Neither here nor there. He didn't win the event. But the other player that we had selected in our predictions has been a hot topic of discussion recently. And, you know, William finished 13th. 13th. Oh, perfect. Top 16. Not bad. Not bad. Still a good amount of money. Definitely. He was the third highest Jelly Garde. Okay. There you go. And Henry Chow, your other pick, finished 14th. So you did pretty good on the prediction. Yeah. There we go. So my first prediction, Sowmit Kukadopu did not play LAIC. And my second prediction, it was Gabriel Fernandez. And that's a name we've probably heard a little. Well, I wouldn't say too much, but definitely heard a lot of the last couple of weeks. Sure. With big news actually coming yesterday as a recording. That it leaked that he is currently banned from playing the Pokemon trading card game and any organized play events. So how did we get to this point? It's not entirely clear. Pokemon hasn't released a statement. I'm sure we're not really saying anything new to anybody that's highly involved in the community or even tangentially involved at this point. But we do have his word. And he says that he was disqualified from the event for the way he shuffled his deck in top four. Saying he looked down and had it kind of shuffled face up. Like riffle shuffled that way face up once or twice. And then corrected that. And then sufficiently, in his words, randomized the deck. But if we are to believe the cause of this, I think that's just his opinion. It's hard to really speak on it without any real statement from Pokemon. And I'm a judge. And I don't really want to speculate too much because that doesn't really help anybody. I'm not there at the tournament. I don't really know what's going on. I've spoken with a couple judges that were there. But I'm not really at liberty to talk about what I spoke about with them. Because, you know, it's kind of like a... I don't know much more than anybody else knows. I'll say that. And it seems like the reason he was disqualified was in line with what he said. That he was basically looking at his deck while shuffling. So I think if there's more to that than that, I would... I don't know. I think it's just tough, man. I think I was talking about this with one of the judges that was at the event. And it's tough when we have really good players that have done well for so long. And just have this mindset. And I don't want to speak to... I don't know Gabriel at all. I don't have a relationship with him. I've never really even had any interactions with him, to be honest with you. Other than tangentially, you know, through another player. But I've seen it in other times, in other situations. Where you get a player that is 16 or 17. And finds a way to find an edge against their opponents. Which they see as an edge. And then, you know, other people see it as cheating. And truthfully, if it ends up being cheating, call a spade a spade. It's cheating, right? We've seen it in other players throughout Pokemon's history. We often forget these masters, even though they're in a higher age division. They're still developing as human beings. They're still people that haven't had... You don't have a fully developed frontal lobe until you're 25. And so you don't really have all the tools needed to do risk assessment. And think about long-term consequences of your actions. And I'm not saying that to excuse the behavior of any individuals. But it's just kind of stating a fact. I mean, we can look back at most of us. Me and Aaron, I'm sure. And say we made some decisions when we were 21, 22, 23. Or even younger that we regret. Or we don't look back on fondly. Absolutely. And I think it's tough when you have players make decisions like that. That have such a large impact on an event. And have such a large impact on their future. And I don't envy any of the judges or staff or organizers. That really had to come up with a solution or an answer to this problem. Because it sucks. There's no real getting around it. It's just disappointing for everybody involved. But tournament integrity is the main reason why judges are at these events. And if we're not able to enforce that, then what are we really doing? Sure. The problem though would be. Go for it. You mentioned tournament integrity. And from a third-party perspective. It feels like this tournament has no integrity. At the point if somebody gets disqualified from playing in the finals. And this isn't the first time this has happened at LAIC. Which is unfortunate in its own right. Right. But even so the precedent that was set previously was that the other person that was playing in the finals just automatically won the event. So now instead we're going back and altering a former match result, presumably after the match slip has been signed, which is a dangerous slope to kind of go down potentially. You know, it's hard to say, I can't say for sure that the match slip was fully signed before they made any sort of decision and it's like, are you trying to balance or weigh out the benefit of publicizing a match versus not publicizing a match and then which one becomes more important. And then you also have to take into account, you know, at this tournament excluded, well, the, the consequences of this decision or something that, you know, Gabriel has to live with. He can't get around the fact that he is currently banned, but then it calls into question how would the rest of the event had played out if he was not there and how does this affect all of the other events that he's ever played in? Yeah. You know, this is one of the most successful seniors players. If I mean, honestly, the most successful senior player ever has won over a hundred thousand dollars in prize money, multiple international championship titles, world's second place world's winner during his time in the senior division, and now you unfortunately have to look back on that and all of it has to be questioned potentially. And you, but that's not to say at some point, Gabriel could come back to the game, assuming that he was able to appeal and become unbanned and be a successful, productive player. But obviously if he did ever return, he would be under a microscope the entire time that he is at every single event. And that's something that maybe he didn't fully understand the potential ramifications of his actions, but when you're playing with the amount of money that we have on the line and the fact that this is the oldest age division, as the age divisions are currently set up, you know, you can't treat him any differently than you would any other player in that age division, regardless of his age, right? No, I think that the way that some people are acting online is a little excessive and ridiculous because he is still a teenager, like you're not going to take him out in the street and beat him or, you know, take away the money that he has earned, unless you could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was able to do something at these other events, but I don't know, man, like it just really sucks and it makes you feel like you have no idea. It makes me almost in a weird way, feel bad for Pedro because it's like the controversy around the event could potentially take away from his accomplishment as the tournament winner. Oh yeah. I mean, it definitely, it's weird. Like we remember a lot of the times the player that like with going back to worlds 2024, you know, we remember he and Rob getting disqualified almost more than we remember, you know, so Fuentes winning, um, and I mean, thankfully, not thankfully, but like, so Fuentes has moved, like proven himself to be a great player since then and done really well and all that stuff. Um, but it's tough. We don't really know the ramifications of like the, the, the long reaching effects of actions definitely are, are bigger than any of us. Um, and the game's gotten so big that actions definitely have more consequences than they did at the start of our Pokemon journeys. Um, and in fact, so many more people, I mean, these, this tournament over 2000 players for LAIC, um, each one of these tournaments impacts so many players and gets more eyes on the game and yeah, Pokemon has to take that stuff seriously with their reputation of, um, you know, tournament integrity and also brand image and all that kind of stuff. Um, I don't know. It's it's, I, I hope, I hope that people are able to appreciate that this is a rare occurrence, at least in my recollection. I, I mean, maybe not as rare as we would hope for sure. Um, but I would say the mass majority of players are playing without, you know, trying to cheat. Um, and if there are people that are questioning the integrity of the game, you know, hopefully they feel like they have the voice to speak up about it and call a judge into the situation or, you know, talk to an organizer or talk to other players or something like that. Um, and that we can move forward as a game, as a, as a body of players and judges and all of that, um, and work towards having a more, um, cohesive and like fruitful community in that regard, I don't know how to best phrase that it's a little bit of a complex, uh, kind of situation to lay out, but that's my takeaway is that, yeah, I, I hate to see like the, now, the, you know, the former most successful senior and was on his way to being that in masters, um, make it, make it a decision to really impact that. Um, and it damages the game. It damages, like, we want the best players playing at these tournaments doing well, but we have, they also have to be held accountable for their actions. Oh, absolutely. And that's where it's like, if you, if presumably there's enough evidence to warrant this ban and he should serve, it should be banned. I mean, if you violate the rules, you should be banned that or the rules, you know, to a degree you should be, if, if you should serve the punishment that is befitting of whatever you have violated. And I, the, the thing that makes it more confusing is Gabriel, presumably attempted to get ahead of things and gave us his side of the story with why he was disqualified and then had announced that he was retiring from Pokemon effective immediately, which now knowing that he has been banned comes across as, Hey, I know I'm getting banned. I'm going to make a public statement and just make a big PR move to have it be so that this isn't an issue for me moving forward, hopefully. And the thing that would really put it all to rest would be if Pokemon would do what they said they were going to do, I think two seasons ago and just make a statement. Um, they, they made a statement that they were going to make more statements. And I don't know if they have made a single statement since they made that statement, maybe there might have been one. Yeah. The Rowan situation, I think they made a statement about, but not since then. And that was 2023. Yeah. So yeah, it's, it's the silence is deafening. I'm not going to sit here and defend that like that. That's just not okay. Like when it's this high profile, when it's this big of a deal, we need organized play to step up and say something about, you know, that situation. Like I, I would hope that we can get and provide that feedback in a constructive manner. Um, and really push that forward. Um, because it is important to have that, like accountability on both sides. Um, and hear about like, why, like, it's such a big deal. Like, I don't know if, if the reigning best player in senior is now working on becoming the best player in the game gets banned from something, like we need to have at least like a, a brief, like, Hey, this is, this is the reasoning behind this decision. Um, please respect the judges that made this decision and the organizers that enforced it, that kind of stuff, because otherwise people are just going to run wild with it. And that's a problem, but that's what's currently happening because of the lack of this transparency. And do you, but do you think, so beyond a statement about a ban, do you think that they should also be making statements about disqualifications? You end up in a weird spot because you are potentially concerned about the player involved. You also have to potentially be concerned about any judges that would be involved because presumably if there's a disqualification, there's a, you know, a chain of custody or a paper trail associated with that. And you don't want players going after organizers or going after judges in the same way that you don't want players to necessarily be targeted for, you know, rulings or disqualifications because of some personal beef that a judge has with them. And I can see that there's a, like, that would be the counter argument for why you wouldn't want the statement. But I think my logic would be that the benefit, the overall benefit of having that statement be available is probably higher than the negative that could also be associated with it. Yeah, I agree. I think at the end of the day, like we need to hear something. And yeah, I think a DQ statement isn't unreasonable like other card games do it. And granted, like it's, you know, there's, Pokemon is very serious about protecting player information. Right. So especially like the last few years they've been moving on, that's been a point of action. You know, we've, we've seen that as, as a judge, I've seen that emphasized a lot, protecting like player information. So that might be, you know, conflicting a little bit. I can see that, but it would still be like beneficial to say, like, Pokemon is aware of the situation and you know, that kind of stuff. Like you don't have to necessarily name the player, but yeah, I don't know. Maybe, maybe there's probably a, right, exactly. Like there's a way to make a statement in such a way that everyone knows exactly what you're talking about. You didn't name any names. You know, it's a tough line to tell toe, but I feel like it's an important line to keep. And then to keep the play, like to make sure the players feel like, you know, our tournament integrity is being upheld, but also like, what are the, what's, what's the logic behind these decisions and like, why, you know, like, why, like getting that would be nice once in a while. So yes, yes. I don't want to bash. Yeah, go ahead. But it gives you the idea it, like it outlines clearly, this is what this person did. If you are doing something similar to it, you will face similar consequences. And, you know, it basically draws the line in the sand, more or less for people to understand what isn't and isn't what is, and is not acceptable. And realistically that kind of already exists in the tournament guidelines, but you and I both know most people don't read them and people, you know, ignorance of the law doesn't excuse. Absolutely. Absolutely. Enforcement or, uh, ignorance of the law is not, um, it's not a defense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that's totally true. Yeah. I hear you. Like, I mean, that's kind of why I think judges are usually lenient, but like, I hate to say this, but I don't feel like Gabriel, this isn't the first time his name has been like brought up on, on stuff. So, you know, it's not, it's not like, this is like, he was ignorant of something or whatever. I mean, that's kind of, I don't think that argument quite holds water in this situation, but we don't need to sit here and speculate on all that kind of stuff. Um, I don't think that really does us any good. No, it doesn't. And I think that it's, you know, now that that mega evolution format is over, we can move on from LAIC. And I felt kind of bad about not recording last week because I had totally forgotten that Stuttgart regionals was happening. I was just so in the mindset of no tournaments in December. That means there's not going to be a Phantasmal Flames tournament until after New Year's and whoops, I completely spaced on this. So that's entirely my bad. We dropped the ball a little bit and we apologize as listeners to our listeners. Um, we, I don't know. I think the holidays got a little bit ahead of us. Oh yeah, definitely. So I apologize that we didn't have an episode out, but we'll talk about it now. Um, you know, a little bit of a bummer that we were doing a, um, post-mortem instead of, uh, you know, pre-op if you will. Um, but we'll still try to make the most of it for sure. Um, so yeah, let's talk about the results of Stuttgart. Yeah. So first we've got some, some stats here and notably this is variant grouping on. And I think that we've got day, this is overall. So day one plus day two, but just Goldengo variants. So this would include Goldengo rocks, a straight Goldengo and Goldengo Joltik were 24% of the room. And I know you've been a big fan of Goldengo rocks recently, John winning a couple of events with it. I think that this deck is massively overhyped and, and we talked a little bit about it before the cast, but in a lot of ways, I think that this deck occupies and over the course of this format, we'll continue to occupy a massively popular section of the metagame, but will ultimately end up being basically Raging Bolt in the modern format. And I say that as you have a lot of the same, a lot of similarities where you're the infinite damage deck, you have an aggressive one prize basic that can one hit KO evolving basics in your Solrock versus the Raging Bolts Lunatone, you have like an onboard draw engine. So you're kind of combining your teal mask ogre pawn and your raging Baltics into one card. And the price you pay for that is making it a stage one. I just, I would say the it's I don't but I don't know if it's a one to defend it for me, I think. Sure, sure. I think it's easy to say, oh, yeah, you know, Goldengo go burr, you know, Raging Bolt went burr. They both like hit hard and hit fast. And I think there are some similarities you can draw, but there are some matchups like against Dragapult Dusknoir. If you are able to get early KOs against a Dragapult deck, like take two or three prizes before they're able to take any KOs. It's harder for Dragapult to take knockouts on Goldengo like than it is the Raging Bolt. You know, with Raging Bolt, there was always like a 210 HP Pokemon on the bench with one of the Teal Masks or Latias later on. With Goldengo, you can play a bench where you just don't have Fez in play. And then now if you if they hit into your picnic basket and now they have a really hard time closing out the game from there without you like just going, OK, I knock out your Dragapult. Now what? I'm down to two prize cards. What are you at? You're at five, six, four. OK, so you can get through one Dragapult, one Goldengo, but not two. And if you pop Dusknoir, Ion Amida 1, I can usually draw out of it, whereas Raging Bolt doesn't necessarily have that luxury. They're really reliant upon Fez, upon the one card you get off of the Teal Dance, and Sada. And you don't necessarily even need a supporter to attack with Golden Goat. You have so many more outs with this deck. You know, late game, if I get Ion Amida 1, and I have a Solrock and Lunatone on bench, if I have any fighting energy, any fighting gong, any Earthen Vessel, any SCR, I am able to draw a bunch of cards and stabilize my board, and then usually take a winning position from there. So it's a lot more resilient than Raging Bolt. It feels more consistent, too, when early turns, you know, just being able to get the Solrock and Lunatone and play turn 1 going first, and draw that hand of 5 or 6, up more cards, get energy in the discard pile to really build your advantage, push your advantage. I don't know, I feel much more confident playing Golden Goat than any other deck right now, which is, you know, maybe it speaks to my level of involvement with the trading card game as much as it does the competency or the position of the deck in the metagame. But I think it's just well-positioned right now, if you will, like against Dragapult. I mean, there's really not a whole lot of bad matchups. I mean, Charizard, arguably. I'd like to see the matchups, right, if you can pull that up? Yeah, sure. So looking at matchups... Now again, keep in mind, this is all Golden Goat variants, and Ali, we can even trigger it for day 2 just to hopefully have the better players on all of these involved decks. And let's look at its worst worst matchups. Worst worst... I mean, Concolder makes sense, yeah, Aethan Stiflosion and Ceruledge and Concolder. Any of those where they're able to one-shot you, Alakazam especially, yep. Any of those where they're able to one-shot you. Gardevoir is surprising to me, it's a little bit worse, especially that's not the Jelly Garde variant. So this still has variant grouping, so it's actually both. Let me see... If I come back... Let me go back and try to turn off... Let me turn off the variant grouping, and we'll see. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see Gardevoir vs. Jelly Garde. What is going on? Variant grouping off, Golden Goat Lunatone. This is day 1. Thank you. Alright. Still, okay, 30% into Jelly Garde, and even still, 41% into regular Gardevoir. So I mean, I guess that makes sense on some level. If they're able to item lock you with Frillish, and you don't have a way to answer that, it can be really difficult for you to close the game out, to get your energy back. I don't feel like it's the worst matchup, but I can see where, yeah, it can get out of your hand. It can run away from you at times, if they're able to TM Devo play, or do a bunch of math and kill your setup before you get anything going, but... Oh, Crustle, wow. One and 0 vs. Crustle. That's good. Well, yeah, I mean, anybody can win one. Small sample size. Yeah. Yeah, Dragapult Charizard's interesting. I guess it's not a... The Dragapult matchup feels pretty good right now. Yeah. Yeah, just over 50%. It's pretty middle of the road for most things, if we're looking at this. Part of this, I think, is the weird way that Limitless calculates ties, where ties are like one-third of a win, but I guess my issue with the deck, at the end of the day, is that in a lot of ways, like Raging Bolt, it feels like your agency is not... You don't have agency, really. The agency isn't... The ability to impact the game is not largely in your hands as the Goldengo player, and like you said, you're more so, in a lot of ways, this is kind of Pokemon in general, but you're setting up this puzzle state of a board and asking your opponent to solve it, and you just do that again and again and again, and if they aren't able to do it enough times, you win the game, and Goldengo is very good at taking two or three prize knockouts. The issue I have with the deck is just, if you ever falter, you just lose. There are absolutely no comeback mechanics within the deck whatsoever, outside of hoping that you have a favorable prize exchange, which the deck is very good at doing. Obviously, I have to admit that. I don't know, man. I just... I hear what you're saying. I will concede that, yeah, you don't have a comeback mechanic. If you get a bad setup for whatever reason, or just miss the energy to get a knockout on like a Charizard or whatever, it can kind of just spiral away from you at that point. So I will concede that. I will also say, though, after playing the deck for the last two weeks, Agency might be overrated a little bit, if you will. If you're really trying to make the argument... I've played Dragapult Dusknoir for the last couple months, and sure, that deck gives you Agency, but what that usually means is you're behind three quarters of the game. You're behind, you're behind, you're behind, and then you Iono late to two cards or one card and you can make a comeback, but that's your main win condition, it feels like a lot of the times. Whereas Golden Goat, it's like, okay, well, if I am able to execute my game plan, I can win the majority of the time, and that's still good. And there's still enough cheeky plays you can make using Solrock and Lunatone. So Solrock is cool, I don't know, with Vitality Band or like, you know, there's enough... I'm not saying it's high level monkey dory plays or whatever, but it's still enough to where I don't feel like I'm going to lose because I drew bad and my opponent did the bare minimum. I can still kind of allow skill expression with the plays that I can make, enough to where it doesn't bore me to death. And that might just be a personal statement again, but I don't know, it's working for me. So I guess that's kind of... I'm biased, you know, if I play in a cup this Sunday and bomb out, then I'll probably have a different take on it next week, but so be it. Full recency bias. I think the biggest benefit for the deck, and this doesn't even have anything to do with Phantasmal Flames, it goes back to Mega Evolution when you got the Solrock and Lunatone, obviously that's a really big buff. The other big thing, and this goes back even further because people were playing it in the Black Bolt White Flare format at Worlds, is that Goldengo finally has the ability to play the most broken A-spec in the game in the form of Secret Box, rather than being pigeonholed into this one-off thing that Energy Search Pro used to allow you to do. Oh, see, I love Prime Catcher, that's the problem. Oh man. I feel like, in a lot of ways, that the decks that are able to successfully play Secret Box instantly have their win rate go up purely through the games where they find that card naturally, or just are able to play it to make some sort of crazy swing turn happen. Yeah. I don't know, I like Prime Catcher. I'm full TikTok brain rot mode of playing this deck right now, I guess. I just like the power of that Prime Catcher. Prime Catcher just feels like I have more outs to win games. All I want to see late game, after I've got my board set up, is Gust outs. So Prime Catcher is just more Gust outs, more ability to do what I want to do late game. That's where I'm at with it. Like, I don't know, Secret Box isn't bad, but it just feels kind of like, meh, you know, okay. Like, I'd much rather, like when I, I didn't really play a whole lot of games with Secret Box. I think I tested with it, like a couple games, but just, it felt like I was, you know, I'd much rather just have Gust outs. That's where I'm at. Okay. Hey, fair enough. I know, I think the other thing that is making this deck be successful right now is that you, unlike Raging Bolt, you do have a lot of high level players that are willing to pick this deck up and play it. Especially in the EU, yeah. Oh, for sure. For sure. And that's actually, you know, Goldengo has long been a favorite of the European region. You know, we've had people like Ilya, who's literally played Goldengo since LAIC last year and then continued, I guess that was another story from LAIC, was Ilya making another top four with Goldengo at the same tournament two years in a row. Which that's a feat that I don't know if anybody else has repeated, like playing the same archetype to the same player with the same archetype at the same international tournament two years in a row. Yeah, maybe not. That's, I don't know, I don't think that speaks to the strength of Goldengo by any means, but I think that that's just, I think it's a really, I think it's a really cool stat. Oh my gosh. Bro, it's not a bad deck, like you're a certified number one hater. For sure, if Goldengo has any haters, I'm one of them. We have said time and time again that we thought that Raging Bolt was a bad deck, and my stance in this current format is that Goldengo is Raging Bolt 2.0, which is an improvement. I fully admit that it is an improvement over the original Raging Bolt model, but it is still, you know, you slapped a fresh coat of paint on your rusty car, and that doesn't make it brand new. No, but it's shiny, and I like- It is shiny, it is shiny. And you do draw a lot of cards, and I'm also, admittedly, like, I do think you're right. It recovers from the Iona to 1, Iona to 2, much better than Raging Bolt ever did. It definitely has the capability to do that, and that's because Goldengo is a better draw engine than anything in Raging Bolt inherently, just because Ochre Pond is weaker and requires cards out of your hand to be a draw engine in any capacity. You obviously saw Fez, that's 1 to 1, and then Lunatone Solrock is kind of like the independent Fez-adipity that you have access to literally every single turn of the game for the most part. Yeah, I've come around, I know in this podcast I've had some reluctancy and doubt in the Solrock Lunatone combo. I've come full circle on that. It is so good. It is the only way you can play this deck. It is literally, like, those two cards alone make this deck so much better as a play and just as a draw engine and early game. I will prioritize getting the Solrock and Lunatone in play before I get Gimmie Ghouls in play. Like, every game. If I have a Nest Ball and a Solrock in play, I will happily, as long as I can get the fighting energy, I will happily get those two in play before I get Gimmie Ghoul in play, because I'm that confident. And Solrock is a serviceable attacker in most matchups. I don't need to swing with Goldengoat. Very few matchups do I need to swing with Goldengoat turn two. And you really don't have the energy in the discard pile and the energy in hand to do that every game. So you really want to be attacking with the Solrock early game. That's your number one guy. I will see. I don't know about Mega Lopunny. I haven't really tested with that too much. I think you need a counter for Cornerstone. I don't know if Mega Lopunny is the answer. I don't know what is the answer. If it's Mega Mawile seems to be my favorite element. He's just a one card inclusion, whereas the Mega Lopunny is more set up. And sure, it has some benefits. But you don't really have an easy way to search out a stage one right now, other than drawing into it. Because you don't really want to run Ultra Ball. You can, but you don't want to. It's kind of the same issue as the Mega Lucario option that people had tried in the last format. I mean, it's still a decent option. Mega Lopunny is obviously a very good card. For sure. But I just don't know if it makes a lot of sense in Goldengoat. Sure. And I know like Daniel Magda and Miloslav Pusledny, they both played Mega Mawile at this event, both made top 16. And Daniel was very vocal on Twitter about the fact that he believes that Mawile is better than Lopunny in the deck. And I'll take his word for it. I'm not going to play enough games of Goldengoat to really get into the nitty gritty about which one is better than the other. I think maybe that's my biggest issue with the deck is I just don't find it enjoyable and therefore I think it sucks. But yeah, I get that. It is like a smooth brain deck where you're really doing the same game plan most games. There's not a lot of variation on that. It's not Gardevoir, right? No. Yeah. You're not puzzling it out. You're really just executing the same kind of thing. And that gets repetitive and boring at times. Like I don't know, I was playing today and it just felt pedantic at times where I'm just like, I already know I'm going to win this game, but I have to like sequence things correctly and just like draw my cards and thin my cards out and like build my hand up. And my opponent's literally like looking at me like, why are you doing this? Like, please put me out of my misery. I know if I don't do this, if you Iona me, then I don't draw what I need to draw. That's literally how it goes. So I don't know. That's where I'm at with it. But I think we've spent a good 15, 20 minutes talking about Gold N' Go. We can move on to something else. Well, I mean, it was, there were three of them, four if you count the Gold N' Go Joltec in top cut of this event. However, much like Raging Bolt, it did not win this event. Oh my gosh. And I, again, maybe I'm just a hater. Maybe I'll eat my own words. If Gold N' Go wins literally every other event of the Phantasmal Flames format, or just any event in the Phantasmal Flames format, I will happily come on and say I was wrong and the deck is good. I do not care that it won the Mega Evolution format. format, new decks, things are different. Okay. And one of the big standouts for that would be the winning deck of this event from Nikolai, changing tabs is a mistake, Nikolai Steiborg with the Charizard Noctowl with four copies of Dawn. Yeah, so this is kind of the new, I would say the new build of Charizard that came out with the Phantasmal Flames expansion. Nikolai, I don't know if he was the sole creator of this or anything like that, but he definitely popularized this if anything else. This is, I do have a note on that. Okay. This is actually an Oscar Madsen deck. Oh, okay. 100%. Yep, Nikolai 100% gave credit to Oscar for this deck list. Great. Yeah, and it's a very interesting list if you want to put it that way, but the main focus is using Noctowl early to set up your stage twos and your Pidgeot DX and Charizard DX. No TM Evo, so it's very reliant upon being able to do that with, but you do have Dawn, sure. So you give up what you have in TM Evo with Dawn, like you don't run Arvin, you don't run really any Jaw support except for two Iono. So you are very reliant upon getting Pidgeot in play and using that to get what you need. Otherwise, I feel like this deck is not gonna be able to do what it wants to do at all. But I mean, that's enough. Like Charizard is self-sufficient with its ability. You know, Dusknoirs can kind of fix your math on some stuff, accelerate your damage output. And then yeah, Fan Rotom's a good secondary attacker here too, Fezendipity, I mean, sorry. Clefki's in there as a counter for a lot of different things but it also just wins games. If you get Clefki early, like, and you put it up in the active against Tarabox, like we saw, or I forget what other decks, but if you can get Clefki out and it just seems like it's in a really good spot right now against Goldengo, you know, you can shut down their Solrock and Lunatone against Dragapult. You can prevent Latias from working so they can't get into Bidu very easily. So I think Clefki's kind of an unsung hero of this format if I have to say. And you have a nice way to get it into the active with Jet Energy. So very cool. I like this list a lot, Aaron. I think it's a very cool innovation and it's nice to see some actual innovation, not just a regurgitation of deck lists from Mega Evolutions. This is actual, like, innovation and actual, like, we've seen Puget Noctowl, I'd say, in the past, or sorry, Charizard Noctowl in the past, but this is more of a tight list, more of a well-thought-out, like, it's a very, like, a lot of one-ofs, for sure. But I like this list a lot. I don't know how you feel about it. No, I agree. And I think we've actually seen this shell, there were a few, I don't remember, I think that they were some Japanese accounts that had posted lists using, like, Puget Noctowl, Dusknoir, insert basic Terra Pokemon with four Dawn and then a stage two line, whether it was, like, I saw Hydreigon, Greninja. There were a couple of others as well, where Noctowl, Puget Dawn as an engine in a deck is effective. It works very, very well. Makes sense, yeah. Something where you really want to get multiple stage ones into play over the course of a game is that's the deck, and multiple stage ones and multiple stage twos, that's the deck where Dawn is going to be effective. And, you know, we've seen people trying to shoehorn it into Dragapult in place of either Brock Scouting or Jacques or Hilda, and you just don't get the same benefit because a lot of times, like Hilda, obviously you needed to be able to specifically find the energies, like your Neo-Upper, when you needed to find it. A lot of times, finding one stage one isn't good enough, so Jacques was better, and sometimes finding only one basic is not good enough, and that's where Brock Scouting was better. And I think it's a cool, that points to good card design in my mind, where this new card is released and it isn't just instantly better than every single other card that is somewhat similar to it, but it does have a home where it is better in a deck like this, and I think that that's really neat. Yeah. Yeah, cool deck. Very vulnerable to item lock. Yeah, I was, I looked at the list, and like, oh, there's no T. Amiibo, you're really reliant upon the Four-Wear Candy. It's interesting, I don't think, have we seen a list in the last month, and like in a long time, where the Pokemon and the trainer count are basically equal? Like, that's interesting to me. Yeah. Just having 26 Pokemon in a deck is kind of unheard of right now. So that's wild. I don't know, like that, you've been playing longer than me. I can't think of a deck that like, other than like Flareon, Plasma Freeze Flareon or something like that, like those kind of, I have to get as many Pokemon as possible in my discard pile to do damage. Like those ran 26 Pokemon, but like, I can't remember the last time I saw a Pokemon deck with that many Pokemon. Yeah, there are some other ones that are kind of like cheesy options, where if you look at like Chandelure, Vileplume, I believe is also somewhat similar. Mew, Jynx, Wobbuffet, Control from like 2006, but that one kind of cheats because it had the Holon Pokemon that served as energies, but were also Pokemon. So you had like 12 of those in your deck. Okay. But outside of that, you're right. No, but a lot of decks in the modern Pokemon game, because item cards are so dang strong, everything is essentially a turbo deck, more or less. And that's why we saw Badoob be as impactful as it was when it first came out. But when you have something where your whole end thing is, I'm gonna search the cards I need. You don't need the item cards or the supporter cards to do that. You Noctowl for a Dawn that finds you a Pidgey, or Dawn and the Rare Candy that gets you your Pidgeot into play. Pidgeot finds you another card. You go find another Dawn maybe to get another Noctowl and a Charizard. The Noctowl gets you Rare Candy and Prime Catcher. Pidgeot finds you another card. You're just doing this, that, and the other. It's a bunch of big combos, turn after turn after turn. And you need the Pidgeot line to really keep this thing flowing. And so that just eats a lot of slots. And Oscar saw fit to fit a 2-0-2 Pidgeot line to the deck rather than a lot of other times where we see Noctowl decks that play Pidgeot. They stick a 1-0-1 and hope that that's good enough to get into play. And like I mentioned on our last episode, playing Flareon with a 1-0-1 Pidgeot line in it, that ain't it. You need that Pidgeot. Pidgeot is what makes decks like this run. Yeah, I agree. I think as I've played with Pidgeot a little bit more, whenever you prize Pidgeot, like one of the pieces in a 1-0-1, it just feels terrible. It hurts so bad. Yeah, it's bad. It hurts so bad. But it's a neat deck. I think I would be surprised to see it continue to see success long-term, mostly because I do think that it is very prone to item lock and there is a lot of item lock in this format still. I think that this deck was uniquely poised to do very well at this event in particular because Goldengo was such a large presence. And I do think that this list has a good Goldengo matchup. You get to do a lot of things like, Goldengo doesn't get to leverage that one prize into a 2-2-2 race you strategy because you have Briar as a comeback mechanic. And being able to take a three-price KO on a Goldengo is a really big deal. So like Briar plus Dusknoir is a lot of times able to let you get over the line in that matchup where you get to KO something, they KO something, you KO a Goldengo and you're down to three, or you KO two one-prizers and you're at four, and then you get to go Dusknoir a rock or a gimme ghoul and Briar KO Goldengo, I win the game. And Goldengo doesn't have any way to really stop you from doing that. So, you know, that's a very, seems like a very good matchup in my mind, but I would be lying if I said that I didn't think Nikolai got pretty lucky against the Dragapult opponents that he played against in Cut where they really seem to draw pretty poorly. Yeah. That does not- Yeah, looking back at those games, that definitely- That doesn't seem like a very good matchup. No, I think if they draw like any, but that's the problem with Dragapult, it's not as consistent as this is. So there's nothing to say. I mean, if you want to go look at that, like having Pidgeot, having Noctowl, like you're able to play more games and that's a huge part of Pokemon right now. Yeah. But yeah, this definitely is coolest, cool to see something new and different when, at least if not, you know, an archetype, at least like a variation on that archetype. So that's kind of cool. Yeah. We had a couple of other new decks. Neither of these made Cut, but just to kind of touch on some other new introductions from the Phantasmal Flames format. And the first one is a card that did not come out of Phantasmal Flames as the main card of the deck with a Mega Kangaskhan Bouffalant tank deck. But the card that kind of enables this did come out of Phantasmal Flames and that is the Jumbo Ice Cream. You know, being able to turn your Mega Kangaskhan into a, what? So we have, we've got Lively Stadium, we've got Bravery Charm, we've got Bouffalant. All of a sudden your Kangaskhan is up to an effective, what, 440 HP, I think? Yeah, something like that. If you want to one-hit KO it. That's crazy. Yeah, I mean, there's not many decks that can hit that kind of number. I mean, Golden Goat, you have to discard nine energy to do that and you run, geez, a total of 11. So yeah, that's really difficult to do. I think eight or nine, eight's probably your max, like you can reach reasonably, maybe nine, but like it definitely feels tough. And yeah, I mean, Jumbo Ice Cream's a new card we've seen. It's heal 80 damage from the active Pokemon, your active Pokemon that has three or more energy attached. So, I mean, Kangaskhan already has to have three energy to be attacking. It's attack's not anything special, but it two-shots everything. So you're chilling. And it draws cards. And it draws cards, which is huge. Like we love that. And then yeah, you run the Ice Cream, you run Monkey Dory. So like you're able to basically effectively heal everything up in between turns or in your turn. I mean, I don't know. I mean, it doesn't seem like a very strategic deck, if you will, but it does enough. Like you're doing fine. Like, I don't know. I think it's kind of funny. Ice Cream's cool. I like that. It's like you're only four of trainer except for Arvin, which is funny. I guess Pokegear, but like that's kind of funny. Yeah. I mean, it looks cool. Like, I think Bouffalant is a card that didn't get enough love and deserves kind of a resurgence, if you will. Okay. Like tank decks are definitely an archetype in Pokemon. We've seen it before. And I think this is a viable strategy, especially, I mean, Golden Goat was so popular and the fact that this did well, considering that, I don't know if we can go back and look at like the matchups for this player, that might be helpful. I don't know, is this limited to labs? It is. So, oh no, this isn't. Let me, I think I would have to go to labs to see the matchups. Give me one second. Yeah. Gosh. I'm wondering like what he lost too. So that would be, it's under tools, right? There we go. Okay. We have the technology. We can figure this out. He was 27th place. Here we go. Pull that up. Matches. Lost to Garchomp. That's a deck that can get over to that number. Okay. Thanks to that fighting weakness. Yep. And it hits you for weakness. Yeah. So that's bad. Then lost to Dragapult Dusknoir, which I can imagine if you just, you know, don't open well, or I don't know. And then. Or they just pop Dusknoir, remove your threats off your bench and. Yeah. Open K.O. the Bouffalant with Dusknoir, right? Right. And you still have to two shot the Dragapult unless you flip three heads. Like, I mean, I don't know. That, that seems a bit sketchy, but other than a lot of these other matchups do seem pretty favorable. Like Charizard's going to struggle and do. I'm a little curious how they won this, this Firigraf melodic matchup. That's, that doesn't seem very good, but I guess maybe. I think you have the shred attack on that. So you should be able to get through everything. Okay, fair enough. Yeah. Shred's nice. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty cool. I like it. I think this is one I'll probably like test on TCG live the next coming days. Sure. Maybe build in person for a week or something. It seems like a low, like turn your brain off and just build the board up and have fun. Like that, that seems pretty cool. So. Yeah. And then another deck we saw come out of this is your personal deck of the moment. Your favorite. I love it. I love this deck. Yeah, gush, gush away. So Lowpony Dusknoir. And the reason that I love this deck is it gives me a lot of Palkia Dusknoir vibes. And I really enjoyed that deck when it was around, but just big combo heavy deck. You're trying to Dusknoir, like board wipe your opponent in conjunction with Mega Lowpony. So you have your Gale Thrust to do 230, which conveniently knocks out a lot of basic EX Pokemon or in conjunction with a Dusknoir pop, you are able to one hit KO effectively. Stage two EXs or any Mega Pokemon as well, outside of the aforementioned 440 HP Kangaskhan, that might give you a little bit of trouble, but you still have some other tools in here as well. And this list is just kind of representative. This was from Simon Mail with the 28th place finish and has some cards in it that I do like, some cards that I'm not a huge fan of personally, but I like this Pidgeot line. We have mentioned previously from the Charizard list that 202 would feel nice. This deck has a lot of space issues because similar to that Noctowl list, you are running a lot of space. of Pokemon, but instead of playing a bunch of Noctowls in your deck, you're playing a giant Dusknoir line. And I've come to the conclusion, I've tried to slim this down at certain points to get down to like a 3-2-2, and that just puts too much stress on you needing too many Night Stretchers throughout a game. Really does feel like you need 4-2-3 to be successful with the deck overall. I mean, I guess maybe you could make an argument that 3-2-3 would be acceptable, but the one thing you definitely cannot shy away from is two Dusklops. You need to be able to access your Dusklops and potentially Dusknoir under item lock. That just kind of goes without saying. Klefki, like you mentioned, huge for this deck. And the thing that I would highlight for this deck and the Charizard list that makes Klefki really successful is the inclusion of Jet Energy, or ways to pump Klefki into the active and remove it after you've utilized Dusknoir is just really big for the deck. But you just do a lot of really cool things. Like you set up either behind a Mega Kangaskhan kind of walling your opponent, drawing cards for you to build up a critical mass of combo pieces to go off, or you Badoo to slow your opponent down. This list plays a Fan Rotom, which can kind of serve double duty in that it can grab like Pidgey, Pidgeotto, and Buneary, or it can grab Ditto for transformative start to turn into Mega Kangaskhan or whatever other Pokemon you would like. I'm not a huge fan of this, mostly because like outside of Fan Call, this deck and most lists only play one stadium. And it is very difficult to find that card because you're not playing something like Kolar's Tenacity. But I don't know, just a really fun deck. A lot of fun to play. The magic spread is pretty interesting. I think that it kind of has play into pretty much everything. But I'd have to go through the whole labs thing to get to this again. But it did, I think it did fairly well for a deck that I personally feel like the lists are still not fully refined. The overwhelming A-spec of choice at this event was the Enriching Energy, which is also the A-spec that I started on with the deck. I've since come around to thinking that this deck is also a deck that is better served playing Primecatcher. I would love to play Secret Box, but I just don't think it fits. I feel like you need a Jamming Tower to win a lot of matchups, and just Primecatcher serving as an additional switch while also being a gust effect that you can Lily or Fez or Mega Kangaskhan into without it being your supportive return pulls a lot of weight for the deck. The advantage with the Enriching Energy in the list is that it gives you an excuse to play more Cups of Hilda, which allows you to find your combo pieces more efficiently while also potentially drawing you four cards. So that is kind of like the tradeoff or the reason that you would include that. Other highlights that I like about this list in particular are 2-boss. I think that this is 100% what will be the standard in this deck moving forward. And going lower means that you lose a lot of matchups that you should otherwise win. Like, I don't think you can beat Jellyguardie consistently without 2-boss. And I think, honestly, you're probably struggling to Dragonbolt a bit more without the second copy of boss either. Yeah, you need to bring up the Dreepies and Dracologues for sure early game. Exactly. But this is a deck that you just really need to be on top of what you're planning to do from the minute you see your opening hand. And it has a lot of variable early game board states where you just need to decide what are the six Pokemon that you're going for on your field. Because unlike a lot of other decks that play this many Pokemon, you don't have Area Zero underdefs to expand your bench, to allow you to just flood the board with every single piece that you would like. So there are games where you don't utilize this Mega Kingis Comp plus Latios engine. There are games where you can't utilize Bidoo. There are games where you can't always put Pidgeot into play. And there are definitely board states where you don't put a Buneary down on turn 1, even though you need Mega Lopunny in most games to win with this deck. But it's, I say most, because it's not 100% of those games. Because there are times where you dust or your opponent down to two prizes, and then you come in with a Blood Moon and Clean House. So I don't know, just definitely a really cool deck. I think that it tickles the part of my brain that I enjoy about Pokemon, where I've discovered that I'm a combo deck player at heart. And that's just, I don't know, that's my bread and butter at this point. That's a cool deck. I think I have a hard time with it. I don't know, maybe it's just the fact that it's not intuitive. It's not like you have the same game plan every game. And so when I'm playing Pokemon on the computer, I have a hard time sitting there and focusing for a long period of time. And so I'm kind of checked out after I lose two games with this. I'm like, yeah, I'm done. So that might just be where I'm at. But I do love the fact that I can play with this deck. But I do love watching somebody play this on stream, or if you're playing it or something like that. It's fun to see somebody that has experience with this pull off those combos. It's so satisfying, for sure. Yeah, I hope that it'll see a good amount of success. You know, it was relatively low play rate at this event. It was only like 2.8%. And lost that other tab. Let's go find it again. We saw, I believe, two or three of them in the top 32. Let's see. Yeah, it wasn't too many. It's killing me. Or no, there might have only been sorry, I misspoke. There was only one in top 32. There were a few a few more if you scroll down and get into top 64. Like there's three more of them. There might have been a few more as well. But just I think it's a decent opening showing for the deck. Again, given the fact that I think the lists are underfined and will continue to improve moving forward. Yeah, it'll definitely be interesting to see. We don't have another major event until Toronto, correct? So that is not until middle of January. So you know, hope everybody has a nice winter. We'll see you next year. Like that's kind of the vibe. And I imagine there'll be a decent amount of change between this tournament and Toronto. I mean, there has to be right? Like, Pokemon's never been a static game, even in the same format. Very rarely do lists not change week to week, especially now in this age where we have online results. We have players working together in an unprecedented manner where you have like super groups and people just sharing information a lot more than we've had in the past, like people putting their lists out or having master classes or stuff like that. So I'm excited to see what happens. We won't probably have too much in depth coverage of between now and Toronto. But there are a couple things that we're excited about coming up, including an interview with Alex Wilson from PTCG Legends, who, if you've been around a little bit on our podcast, we shout that out. We shout that website out a lot. But Alex is the kind of the brains behind all that. And we'll be talking with him later in the month in December, kind of hearing his story and his perspective on everything he's been doing the last few years now. And what he's trying to accomplish with that. And I'm excited. He's also just like a guy I've known for a long time. He's from North Carolina, I'm from South Carolina. So he's got a really dry sense of humor and a really nice guy. Just a good person to be in the community, to have around. So I'm excited to hang out with him a little bit, get to hear and know him a little bit more. And yeah, I'm looking forward to that. Yeah, absolutely. And then I know we're going to be talking a little bit about the Yeah, absolutely. And then I know we've also tossed around the idea of doing some deeper dives on a couple of decks and how they've evolved throughout their tenure in the game in the modern format in the forms of both Gardevoir EX from Scarlet and Violet, as well as Charizard EX from Obsidian Flames. And you know, we saw, even as recently as the last couple of formats, some new archetypes coming out for these decks, and evolutions of these decks and changes to these decks over the time in the standard format. And we thought that that would serve as like a modern time capsule in a way, where you just get to see the different forms that the deck has taken throughout its time in the game as we kind of shove them into the time capsule and put them in the bin. When both of those cards are rotating out, you know, come next year. True. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we don't want to get too ahead of ourselves there. There's still a lot of Pokemon to be played between the rotation. But yeah, like, that'll be cool to have kind of a retrospective on that. I mean, you could do one on Golden Go, you could do one on, you know, I don't know, Maridon if you wanted to. Stuff like that. But yeah, we'll definitely bring you along on the Battle Frontier and yeah, hope to help to have you along. Absolutely. So if you, if you had any input, you know, a specific deck that you would like us to highlight in that sort of series, let us know in the comments of this episode, either on YouTube or Spotify. And we will see you guys next week, hopefully at our regularly scheduled time of Thursday at 8am Eastern. This one obviously going out probably a day late. I'm, I don't know, maybe I'll just power through and stay up and edit this tonight. But, you know, if you hear me talking about this still, then I probably didn't do that. And I hope that you appreciate the episode anyway, and that you will reach out to us on social media. We have all of the links for that for both Jon, myself and the show in the description of the episode. And we will catch you guys next week on the Battle Frontier. Have a good week.